41 Pilgrims and 44 Turkeys: near parity

Thanksgiving connotes many different things to different folks, but it always seems to sustain a built-in dichotomy; there's the notion of coming together–bridging the gap between oneself and others, inclusion, sharing, the offering of thanks in general and specific ways.  Besides the 'us & them' getting together motif, there's also its opposite—the 'us vs. them'.  This is typified in the football connotation of Thanksgiving—where I come from it's the annual Melrose/Wakefield Game. Inevitably the holiday seems to revolve around pairs, friendly and otherwise.

Interestingly, in the realm of our image collections the most natural Thanksgiving pairing (based on the historical basis of the holiday), Indians and Englishmen, is pretty much under-represented. The central twosome really seems to be Turkeys and Pilgrims.

I spent some time recently looking at the Thanksgiving section of Vintage Holiday Cuts (0486998290).  It's a large collection with over 500 total images, of which about 93 have to do with Thanksgiving.

Within that group there are 41 Pilgrim images and 44 Turkey images. I'm kind of partial to them both, but I guess I prefer the Pilgrim ones because they don't have that dark overlay of living/cooked....

There's plenty of cooked turkey images here, but I prefer the living...

And even more, the aggressively living.

On the Pilgrim side we have a whole spate of takes on the motif:

Pious to dutiful...

Besieged to betrothed...

To the slightly Washington Irving-ish bizarre....